The Rising Sun by Douglas Galbraith

They say the mad hear demons calling to them, as clear as a man in the street calling their names. I heard tell once that they would be mad and happy all their lives were it not for these voices. It is the voices that drive them to their destruction; moral, physical or both. So it may be with my numbers. I can no more forget twenty-three ells of bengal or the precise proportions of the blue crepe to the incarnate and of the incarnate to the white than a man could shake the lunacy from his head by standing up and saying: 'I am whole.'

To be sure, the disease was common enough at the time. There was hardly one in the country who could not hear the sweet music of so many pounds, so many tons of this or that commodity, so many per cent. The demons whispered it in the taverns, it sighed out of the pillows in duchesses' bedrooms, the pages of merchants' ledgers and scholars' tomes fanned it into their ears, the bleating of the sheep on the high hills was strangely altered in the ears of their shepherds. If others further off could not or would not hear it, they were either ill-wishers or fools who deserved no part of the spoils.

I was the historian of these numbers. I became - may I say it? - the Herodotus of our comic tragedy. There was not a pound of ship's biscuit, a box of candles or a pint of lime juice but was counted out and set down in my chronicle. Kinghorn canvas: two thousand eight hundred and thirty two and a half ells to be sewn together as required by three hundred and thirty pounds of thread and five hundred needles. Enough to blow a nation's hopes half way across the world and over its insane edge.

The numbers keep me here, staring at my own form in the black glass of the window. That and the sound of my own blood too loud in my ears. Too much of claret and fine Virginia to thank for that.

One, two. Three? No, two of the clock. I'll not find sleep tonight, and to tell the truth am resolved not to seek it for fear of what might come to me. Even the clocks quarrel in this country. One, two again, further off. Now is the hour, it says. If they could heave up their stones and rush at each other I swear we would have a ten years' war of the clocktowers.

Two? Two of what? Two ounce of onion seed, butter two firkins, glass two hampers wherein granados four hundred, ninety and three. Or four perhaps? No. No, three definitely. There is so much to be forgotten now, but the numbers I swear will never leave me. I am a man haunted by numbers. They were my vocation. How gilded Fortune called me to them!

'I take it you can keep a ledger?'

'As well as any man, sir!'

'Well, then, we'll see what use we can make of you.'

Hence the numbers. I wrote in those ledgers but never read them. To have gone to the page would have dishonoured me: I was the Imam of the Grand Totals, they were my five-times prayers called out in account-room, warehouse, quay and hold.

They pinch me in my sleep. I wake at four, bruised by memory. My skull echoes to the ghostly sound of 'Ship's biscuit! 10,000 pounds to Dolphin, 20,000 to St Andrew.' How fat the tropic fish must be today!

They will be my last thought, my very last I don't doubt it. Pale and enfeebled I shall lie on my fatal bed, my faithful daughter (should I ever have one) holds my fevered hand. Suddenly, I jerk upwards and with my last strength, shout, 'Shoes, eleven hodgets, being a thousand eight hundred and twelve pairs!' and fall back, a bloodied foam on my lips.

Tomorrow, at sunrise, I shall flee them, knowing as I go that they are no more to be evaded through time and space than the Furies themselves. I shall take them with me on my back, the original Scots pedlar, the chapman of my own and my people's past. Wherever and as fast as I go in the world, the numbers and the names shall come with me and this night I cannot see an end to it.

But three days ago I saw a nation fouled by its own failures. As did the unfortunate Captain Green from his fine vantage-point, kicking in the wind, his posthumous eyes looking at the wreckage of his own incorporated ambitions, ash to the waterline. They wouldn't even give him the drop.

Not all had lost their wits. I have the evidence here in my pocket, some privy-paper broadside thrust into my hand by one in the greedy crowd, or by the author himself perhaps, too proud of his own wit to ask for the 'Two Pence' demanded at the head. Here it is: Every Man his Own Empire or, Worcester Sauce for a Scotch Lamb. He should be thankful the bleating flock were not in the reading mood or he would have joined the enterprising captain. I would have spoken with him, but no sooner felt the paper in my hand than he was off into the crowd like a thief. Men of sense have become a secret fraternity, the members of which dare not open their mouths even to make themselves known to each other for fear of being set upon. As it is, I only took it from my pocket after returning to my lodgings. That was not a day to let men look over your shoulder.

He is right, of course: even in our revenges we are not one hundredth part of what we imagine ourselves to be, and the stretching of Captain Green's neck will not sweeten a single Scotsman's palate. I wonder if he is still there, staying on to fight, or was he that one that passed us on the road, galloping headlong for the border?

My head nods at my own image in the window as if my real and phantasmal selves would stop and talk awhile. But I will not have it. For days past my dreams have been nothing but drownings and hangings. What world is a man in when he must prefer the dead life of exhaustion to sleep?

A quarter of a day must be staggered through, or less. Half a night. My travelling companions and I have so stirred up the lees of our little tale that there is no help for it now. And so I have dug it out once again. Hidden like contraband, its cack-handed binding cracking as I open it. My old friend, my confessional, my hiding-place, my self, salted and dried, stitched in sailcloth, all but done with.